Miners' story a film possibility

LOS ANGELES - In a study crammed with keepsakes of his Hollywood life, movie producer Mike Medavoy keeps a black-and-white snapshot of some boyhood soccer pals. He's the gangly mop-top in the middle. The legend reads: "Chile, 1957."

LOS ANGELES — In a study crammed with keepsakes of his Hollywood life, movie producer Mike Medavoy keeps a black-and-white snapshot of some boyhood soccer pals. He’s the gangly mop-top in the middle. The legend reads: “Chile, 1957.”& lt; /p>

Fifty-four years later, Medavoy, who grew up in Santiago, is going back to his homeland with a film project that will test his skills as a moviemaker and will close a personal loop in his life. It’s a drama about the Copiapo mining accident, in which 33 Chilean miners were trapped deep underground for 69 days last year; they finally emerged alive.

Medavoy has acquired rights from the miners, who jointly sold their story in a deal brokered by William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.

Medavoy will also have rights to a book that is being written about the incident by Hector Tobar and is commissioning a script by Jose Rivera, whose screenplay for The Motorcycle Diaries was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A Chilean businessman, Carlos E. Lavin, will help finance the film.

But there is no Hollywood studio yet involved, at least in part because Medavoy — who as producer or executive has been involved with films as complicated as Black Swan and Shutter Island — has been around long enough to know that difficult stories, at least in their early stages, are best fostered outside the studio.

“I had the same reaction I think most people here do,” Medavoy said of his initial reluctance to tackle the miners’ tale, with its multiple characters, underground setting and almost universally known outcome. “Do I really want to make a picture in which everybody knows the end?” he recalls asking himself.

On further consideration, though, Medavoy decided that some of his biggest mistakes occurred when he said no to a movie because the underlying events seemed too familiar.

While he was a production executive at United Artists in the mid-1970s, for instance, Medavoy passed on a Watergate project being offered by director Alan J. Pakula. Warner Brothers went on to make what became All the President’s Men, which won four Oscars in 1977.

The miners, seven of whom joined Medavoy for dinner in Beverly Hills recently, bring a plethora of personal stories that Rivera hopes will contribute to a film that satisfies both the audience and the survivors.

“From my personal experience in dealing with the miners, they all think this is a story of unity; this is a story of coming together,” said Guillermo Carey, a spokesman for the group.